John Phamvan

Founder, Kind Systems

@johnphamvan@ruby.social

John Phamvan is the founder of Kind Systems, a boutique consultancy focused on bringing human-centered design and modern, flexible software to the Federal government and startups with highly complex business and compliance needs. Previously, he led engineering and product efforts at Happy Money, Motor Trend Group, and GrowthHackers. He holds an MBA from USC Marshall and degrees from UC Irvine.

Talk Session

DDD Surrounded by Legacy, Govt Edition

Co-Presented with Adrien Abrams

How does one employ DDD to make meaningful change in an environment where government stakeholders are overburdened with just managing the current operational and regulatory tasks of the nation's largest programs?

What does a modern system look like when it is an island among decades-old, distributed monoliths?

How does your team proceed when there is not full buy-in, subject matter experts are too busy to talk, and efforts to implement object-oriented approaches have had mixed success?

In this case study, we will present the challenges our team encountered while applying DDD in a federal agency that was not ready for DDD. We will also discuss the approaches we took to acquire the policy and business expertise to build a prototype to demonstrate a different approach to developing a complex government system. In the end, we were able to craft a meaningful, highly realistic prototype of the solution — one that demonstrated an understanding of the business needs and had the flexibility to adapt to constantly changing policy while interoperating with existing legacy systems.